


we really did try to make it

by FireLorde



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, introspective, stevebucky if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 00:53:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17234366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireLorde/pseuds/FireLorde
Summary: there was an emptiness where the asset's soul used to be.for the MCU fiction collective.





	we really did try to make it

It’s too late, isn’t it?

That’s what he says when he sees the man- his friend- plummeting toward the bottom of the river. Debris and flaming metal from the helicarriers rain hellfire upon the water’s churning surface. He doesn’t like how the way down looks.

He knows, though he doesn't _ truly _ know, that he’s already taken a free fall for that man.

Even as a mindless machine, one thing has always terrified him: heights. Why? It mystifies him. Some forgotten past reincarnation of his must have met his end falling. It’s etched into his mind, he’s tried to study every line of it, but the memory is locked in some sort of dead language that looks like the scrawled writing of a young soldier from Brooklyn. Either way, his breath catches in his throat when he looks down those 500 or so feet, trying to keep his thoughts away from his body snapping and breaking against the raging Potomac, tossed like a torn rag doll into the drink. He has to remember to breathe as he swan-dives down, his brain pounding against the confines of his skull. 

“Your name,” the man had started. He replays the conversation in his head.

Assets don’t have names, they don’t have friends, they don’t have feelings. They receive orders. They carry them out. They wait and listen. They follow that cycle through. He was an asset.

“Is James,” the man said, between labored breaths.

No it isn’t, every neuron in his brain screamed, no it isn’t.

“Buchanan,” the man breathed, laying completely still.

_ Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. _

“Barnes.”

“Shut up!”

_ Why  _ was that making him so angry? What was he doing? How dare that man, that nationalistic symbol of American power and prestige he had hated his entire life, that man, how dare he try to outstretch his arm in the name of empathy? It was a trick, then. Nothing more, nothing less. Something to make him feel more vulnerable, something to throw the asset off his rhythm.

So then why was he feeling an odd pang of nostalgia, of need in his gut? Why was he-  _ quite literally _ \- falling for that man?

There was an emptiness inside him, and with every word from that man’s mouth, something grew, thrived, drank up his mind and his existence. And then he remembered, if he hadn’t already. If that pause between blows to the man’s face was indicative of remembering, if the realization hit the man just before the fall was any more obvious. And the fall from the helicopter: the Captain’s fall from grace. The Soldier’s fall into remembrance, his descent into knowing. A name, a face.

A name that belonged to a face.

All these thoughts passed through the Soldier’s mind as he dove deeper, taking the Captain by his shoulders. Had it not been for the possibility of him drowning, the Soldier would have liked to look at his Captain under the quiet layer of water that wrapped him up like a suffocating, boundless blanket. Like the cheap wool blanket Mrs. Goldstein gave him for his thirteenth birthday.

The Captain was beautiful. His golden hair strung out like a halo, his lips slightly parted, his skin pale and clear, save for a couple of beauty marks. That’s what his mother called the scattered dots on Rebecca’s skin. He was beyond beautiful. He was ethereal underwater, the pale light shining on his face as if he was an antique doll housed in a museum.

He let the Captain’s head break the waves first, holding his chest like a vice, as if it was the last embrace he’d receive before death. And on the banks of the Potomac, against rocky, stubbled sand, he laid the Captain out, watching him for a just a moment.

He wasn’t breathing.

No pulse.

A steady rhythm of pushes against his chest, turning his head from side to side. Unsuccessful. He repeats.

And then, a brush of lips upon lips, a deep, filling breath. Another one, until the Captain’s pulse flutters to life, and until his lips part, the Sergeant forgets, but as his eyes twitch with life-

_ Bucky _ remembers.

And the man on the shore, the man on the bridge, the man he’d shared his first life with, shudders with life, his mouth moving ever so slightly.

“Steve,” Bucky says, quietly, feeling a thousand emotions hit him square in the jaw.

What can he do but walk away? Away from the last piece of broken stained-glass that fits the chaotic mosaic of his life, away from the only piece of 1945 he had left. He takes a few steps back, the silt of the Potomac crackling underneath his HYDRA-issue boots. 

There’s one last look at the man he called his friend so many decades ago before the Sergeant feels everything that swarmed his body leave him in a matter of milliseconds, and the Soldier turns on his heel, taking off toward the thickly wooded area of tight-knit trees crowding the shore.

He leaves the Captain there, and the emptiness in the Asset’s soul returns.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on twitter @casdanvers or tumblr, where i'm liferuiner63. happy new year, by the way!


End file.
